New Ebola Drug 100% Effective In Monkeys

TrisexualPuppy writes "A team of scientists at Boston University has created a cure for the Ebola virus, first discovered in 1976. After setting the correct dosages, all monkeys tested with the vaccine survived with only mild effects. No tests have been performed on humans yet, as outbreaks happen infrequently and are difficult to track. Quoting NPR: '[The drug] contains snippets of RNA derived from three of the virus's seven genes. That "payload" is packaged in protective packets of nucleic acid and fat molecules. These little stealth missiles attach to the Ebola virus's replication machinery, "silencing" the genes from which they were derived. That prevents the virus from making more viruses.'"

Comments

Remember

[Anonymous Coward]

This does not mean you can eschew the use of a condom when fucking monkeys.

Re:first post?

[TrisexualPuppy]

I don't think it was 30 years ago.

Exactly. I talked with one of my contacts at the Atlanta CDC about this. She said that little was said at that point about exactly how they procured this method, but it is something possible only with new technologies that have evolved in the past decade. That, and the limited amount of manpower dedicated to such a project mean that unless you're really lucky, it's going to take the full 30 years.

I wonder how many lives will eventually be saved and what awards will be gotten because of this.

This brings to mind...

[eexaa]

...wouldn't this be a great generic treatment for all infections by viruses?

If not, I'd like to know the reason.

Re:This brings to mind...

[nashv]

The method with which the "drug" works is called RNA intereference. RNAi is more or less a standard method in molecular laboratories. Unfortunately, the efficacy of RNAi in different cells and for different proteins varies a lot, for reasons that are poorly understood. Further, RNA is rather unstable in water, and delivering substantial doses of RNA to cells in an organism has remainded challenging.

Morever, all viruses do not start with an RNA-based genome. Some DNA based viruses use promoters for their genes that cause very strong expression of the genes, like the CMV promoter [PDF alert], which is used in isolation to create "over expression" in molecular biology. RNAi is typically very poor against such strong promoters.

Ebola is a virus that is relatively slow replicating in the initial stages. It is not a particularly ingenious design as compared to say the flu virus. This gives the RNAi a chance to work against it.

In short, I don't want to say _never_ (that'll just be ignorant), but as yet, RNAi needs a lot of research and is perhaps not the best strategy for all viruses.

Re:Time for the SuperEbola?

[Low Ranked Craig]

This is not the same as antibiotics.

100% effective in FIVE monkeys

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

Before you start declaring a CURE!!! look at the number of test subjects. Preventing death in five monkeys is not exactly a cure. It's a very promising start, but they need to test it in non-infected humans to make sure it's not going to cause some odd problems and to get max dosages worked out.

Ebola's death rate is so high that this treatment would have to be extremely dangerous to keep it form being used. Death rates are in the 80-90% range now, so if it dropped them to even just 50% it's worth a large risk.

Re:100% effective in FIVE monkeys

[phoenix321]

A mortality rate of 80% of out 5 monkeys, 4 would have died. If 0 died in the vaccine group, it is a pretty significant finding.

Maybe someone here can be bothered to draw up the exact significance, but I'm pretty sure it will be a percentage surprisingly high for a sample of 5 individuals, since the mortality is so high to begin with.

For example with rabies, the mortality rate is a solid 100%. Managing to save even 1 infected individual is nothing short of a monumental achievement, as in all recorded history, we only have 3 survivors total, with Jeanna Giese being the first and the 2 others with the course derived from her treatment. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_protocol - so these 3 survivor make up a pretty high significance when compared to 0 before.

Re:100% effective in FIVE monkeys

[izomiac]

At 85% mortality, the chance of all five monkeys surviving due to random chance would only be 15% ^ 5 = 0.0076%, which is well below the traditional alpha level of 5%. It'd take a mortality rate of 45% before you could say that, so for deadly diseases you don't need huge sample sizes to show effectiveness, though you would need a larger sample size to measure the size of the effect. The researchers have a very good claim that the treatment lowers the mortality rate of the tested strain of Ebola in monkeys. Of course, adapting this treatment to humans probably isn't going to be trivial. (You do have a point about "cure", though I think we all realize the overall quality level of science news reports in the popular media.)

Re:100% effective in FIVE monkeys

[Daniel Dvorkin]

The p-value is 0.00032 by my off-the-cuff calculation (pbinom(0, 5, 0.8) in R.) So yeah, it's pretty significant. That being said, sample sizes this small still do tend to make people nervous -- the p-value is calculated assuming that the monkeys in question represent a good sample of the population, and doesn't account for lab-specific or family-specific effects. (Where were the monkeys bred? How closely are they related? What sub-population do they belong to? Etc.) So we can certainly accept the finding for what it is, but regulatory bodies will, with good reason, want to see larger animal trials before approving even limited human use.

Re:first post?

[RDW]

'She said that little was said at that point about exactly how they procured this method, but it is something possible only with new technologies that have evolved in the past decade.'

Yes, their method clearly depends on RNAi (RNA interference), for which the key paper only came out in 1998, and the Nobel Committee obviously didn't regard the discovery as 'simple enough'!:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2006/adv.html

It wasn't until 2001 that RNAi was demonstrated in mammalian cells, so its use as a standard tool in molecular biology only dates back to the last decade. To apply this sort of strategy to Ebola also requires knowledge of its genome sequence, which also wasn't complete until the 90s, as well as an effective method of getting the active molecules into infected cells (like the lipid-based packaging approach used here). There is indeed active research aimed at applying RNAi to other viruses, including HIV, but it's far from straightforward.